Sunday, April 10, 2011

REST IN TEMPO

The bank robbery drama "Dog Day Afternoon" is based on a real incident that happened in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1972; director Sidney Lumet was so committed to making the story feel as real as possible that he decided the film would have no score. But he cheated, gloriously, by opening with a montage showing everyday life unfolding in New York City on one of the hottest days of the year. As I wrote in an appreciation of editor Dede Allen, who cut "Dog Day," "From John's first line ('Lately I've been thinking how much I miss my lady') the sequence conjures an aching nostalgia, not just for the hardscrabble Big Apple of 1975 that Allen's montage preserves in a kind of miniature stealth documentary, but for the hero Sonny's life as a free man -- a world that existed before his crime landed him in jail and deprived him of every experience, emotion and relationship that meant anything to him. The delayed introduction of Sonny and his partners waiting outside the bank is preceded by two shots of the Calvary cemetery in Queens (the Manhattan skyline looming behind a field of tombstones), then a shot of a Kent cigarettes billboard noting the current time of day -- the exact minute when Sonny's freedom ended.

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About Me

A Wisconsin-born freelance writer now based in the great city of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, his pieces have been included in the anthologies Da Capo Best Music Writing and L.A. Now. He first entered the blogosphere in 2006 with the music site Downbeast, an offshoot of the L.A. indie-jazz label Cryptogramophone. He was also a senior editor of Glue magazine and has written for numerous publications including L.A. Weekly, No Depression, All About Jazz, Variety, Los Angeles magazine, Time Out-New York, Flaunt, Oxford-American, Black Book, New Times, Extraordinary, and more. Currently, he is working on a book for Asahina & Wallace publishers on L.A.'s underground jazz scene.